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Transcript:

Professor Daniel Mills: One of the things that a lot of people comment on is that dogs seem to be naturally attuned to them and be able to sense their moods and whatever. Part of our work here is actually to look into the scientific basis of that.

Narrator: The key to a dog's ability to read our emotions might lie in something we all do without knowing it.

Professor Daniel Mills: When we express our emotions in our faces we don't do it symmetrically. It's been shown that if you take somebody's face when they're expressing some emotion, like happiness or anger or something like that, there is a difference between the left and right side.

Narrator: Composite faces consisting of two right or two left sides look very different.

Professor Daniel Mills: One of the theories is that maybe our emotions are more faithfully presented in the right side of our face and that's the side that we tune into. And when we look at a face, we have what's known as a natural left-gaze bias. So you naturally look much more towards the left, i.e. the right-hand side of somebody's face.

Narrator: Eye-tracking software has demonstrated that when presented with a human face, we nearly always look left first. Daniel Mills wanted to find out if dogs use the same trick to read human faces.

Professor Daniel Mills: Shifting the direction of your gaze we thought was fairly unique to people until we started looking at dogs.

Narrator: To test the theory, his team recreated this experiment with dogs.

Scientist: Muz, what's that?

Narrator: They presented a series of images showing human faces, dog faces and inanimate objects, and recorded the direction of the dog's gaze with a video camera.

Scientist: (whistle) We found that dogs when they are looking at pictures of dog faces or objects, they will look randomly on the left or the right.

Narrator: But when it came to human faces, they made a remarkable discovery.

Scientist: So now we have Taz looking at a human face. So first she's looking in the middle of the screen. And here is the first eye movement on the left. She's in the middle and she's going on the left. And then the dog is going to be even more on the left. So now this is Muz, and then we can see really well that this is a left gaze. From here to here, we can see the white here. She's even moving her head.

Narrator: As far as we know, no other animal has this relationship with the human face. Dogs don't do this with each other. Incredibly, it seems they've acquired a new skill to enable them to read our emotions.

Professor Daniel Mills: Being able to detect when somebody is angry or potentially going to be harmful to them, you could understand that there may be a biological advantage in being able to read people's emotions. And equally, it makes sense for a dog to approach somebody when they're smiling. If dogs can read human emotion, and increasingly the scientific evidence is beginning to point in that direction, that's going to form the basis of a very strong bond between human and dog.

Narrator: Evidence like this appears to underpin our conviction that dogs understand us in a way that other animals cannot.

Discussion

Comments

Hey, that's news! The dogs I've seen always run away from me when I smile! (Geez, looks like I have a horrible smile!) :(( Goodness knows why! Last time I asked my mom she told me it was just fine (though my dad thought otherwise!)! :000

Interesting and amazing!
I've heard that horses are very sensitive and are able to reflect and read a person's moods as well as dogs. I've got a feeling that their EQs must be higher than those of some humans…??!
(ી(΄◞ิ౪◟ิ‵)ʃ)
Oh, a friend of mine is really amazing as well, she can allude to whoever the person is!
( ᵅั ᴈ ᵅั;)～♬

Do they??
Really??
Wow....!! They can read our emotions..................
It may be true :) Yet a very interesting fact!! That's lovely...
I want to have a horse too :0
Well,having Higher EQ is something wow....
Do you know ken........people having higher EQ are really self-motivated and they have patience....
They know about their lackings and above all they are not selfish :) They have good social relations and aren't harsh :)
I want to be a person like this too....
They have good conducting sense :)) They manage things easily :))
I got to know about these facts when i was in Matriculation. Our English teacher taught us about it .......
I've also heard+read an interesting fact...
It's that,
A grey colored parrot's brain works more efficiently than a six years old kid :))
I don't know if it's correct or not but i read it in a magazine :)

Wow, I really want to have a higher EQ! They definitely must be better people. I suggest these people to rule the country. Then the world might be a better place!
And the fact you read is true, hadia. I read it myself plus saw it in news! Yes, it really is weird. Maybe animals aren't creatures with five senses at all! Well, I think Disney wanted to prove something by creating zootopia... :)))

Hi hadia, thanks for your comment. It's been a long time, sorry for my late reply, it's hard to know when to receive a comment.
Yesh, EQ is amazing! I know some prople w/ high EQ, they are great, I wanna be like that, too...
从/ ´∀｀ﾉノ

I strongly believe it's true that pets can sense emotions. I always know when my cats are sad, happy or content. For example, my cat got lost a few months ago, when it was only 2 months ago. I found him after a week and it seemed to be so frightened and scared, and when I took it back home, it wanted just to sleep for hours in its'basket and it couldn't even it. I read somewhere that cats can be under the stress too, just like humans, and I believe it's true and I I'm a real animal lover. I know they can understand anything and that's why I'm always trying to be as good and kind to them as I'm with my family and friends.